An Improved Method for Anomalous Traffic Detection in SDN Based on Gated Feature Fusion

Existing anomalous traffic detection methods based on feature fusion in Software-Defined Networking (SDN) lack adaptability in weight allocation mechanisms. Consequently, their detection accuracy and model generalization capabilities fail to meet practical security requirements. To solve these limitations, this paper proposes a refined detection method based on hybrid feature selection and gated fusion. First, the framework employs XGBoost combined with the Recursive Feature Elimination (RFE) algorithm. This process identifies shallow statistical features with high discriminative power. Simultaneously, the method utilizes a 1D Convolutional Neural Network (1D-CNN) integrated with a Squeeze-and-Excitation (SE) block to extract deep temporal semantic features. Subsequently, a tailored gated fusion mechanism incorporating linear projection layers for feature alignment adaptively integrates these two categories of features. The fused features are then input into a Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) to execute anomalous traffic detection. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves superior performance. Specifically, on the InSDN Dataset, the binary and multi-classification accuracy rates reach 99.91% and 99.88%. Similarly, the accuracy rates on the NSL-KDD dataset are 99.78% and 99.76%. Finally, we established a local simulation environment. Experimental results demonstrate that our method attains an average precision exceeding 93% for anomalous traffic detection in simulated real scenarios.